What is Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys?

It is a copypasta about drinking beers with male friends, used to caption ironic object-labeling image macros in circlejerk meme communities.

Where did Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys come from?

The 'Cracking Open a Cold One with the Boys' Facebook page launched on February 13th, 2016 and became the central hub for image macros using the copypasta.

What does Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys mean?

Urban Dictionary defines it as multiple men enjoying cold beers together, framed as a ritual of male friendship, and ironic edits play on that mock-serious tone.

How do you use Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys?

The copypasta is typically pasted onto object-labeling image macros where an odd object stands in for 'a cold one' and an unlikely group becomes 'the boys'.

Is Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys still popular?

It is a classic ironic-meme copypasta from 2016 and 2017 that still circulates in circlejerk and object-labeling contexts, with its peak activity tied to Reddit posts and the dedicated /r/CoaCOwtB subreddit in 2017.

Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys

2016copypastaclassic

Published August 17, 2026

Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys is a copypasta about drinking beer with male friends that became a template for object-labeling image macros in ironic meme and circlejerk communities starting in 2016. The phrase gets pasted onto absurd scenes where anything from psychedelic drugs to political candidates stands in for either the beer or the boys.

copypasta memes object labeling ironic memes exploitable templates 2016 memes

Overview

Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys is a copypasta about drinking beers with a group of male friends, most often pasted over object-labeling image macros in ironic meme and circlejerk communities3. The joke usually swaps the literal beer for something absurd, or turns an unlikely group into 'the boys,' so the humor rides on how straight-faced the phrase sounds next to the image.

Urban Dictionary entries for the term define it plainly as the act of multiple men enjoying cold beers together, framed as an 'ancient ritual' of male friendship2. That mock-solemn tone is exactly what ironic edits play with, treating a casual beer run like a sacred bonding rite.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Facebook (source) / Reddit (viral spread)

Date

2016

The 'Cracking Open a Cold One with the Boys' Facebook page launched on February 13th, 2016, curating image macros captioned with the copypasta and giving the phrase a central hub. Within roughly two years the page picked up more than 102,000 likes, which pushed the format into wider ironic-meme circulation3.

How It Spread

On January 14th, 2017, YouTuber One Million Times posted 'Cracking Open A Cold One With The Boys 1 MILLION Times,' a repetition video that helped push the phrase further outside its Facebook base1.

Reddit picked it up two months later. On March 12th, 2017, the /r/CoaCOwtB subreddit opened as a dedicated home for 'pictures of ya boys and their cold ones being cracked open.' Around the same time, Instagram user papafranku posted an Expanding Brain edit comparing various psychedelic drugs to 'cracking open a cold one with the boys,' which pulled over 63,300 likes within two months. A week later, on March 19th, Redditor Dogekami cross-posted an image macro of students holding aluminum cans in a classroom to /r/MemeEconomy3.

Political and situational edits followed in May 2017. Redditor moistchortle posted a Bernie or Hillary edit to /r/me_irl in which Bernie Sanders picks 'a cold one to crack open with the boys' as his favorite drink, collecting over 2,800 points and 60 comments in a day. On May 16th, Redditor moon_no_rise shared a mock traffic-stop photo on /r/dankmemes where a cop asks the driver to 'please step out of the vehicle and crack a cold one with me and the boys,' which took 1,500 points at a 94% upvote rate inside 24 hours.

How to Use This Meme

The format typically pairs the copypasta with an object-labeling image macro. Common convention tags an unlikely object as 'a cold one' and an unlikely group as 'the boys,' so the punchline is the mismatch between the reverent tone of the phrase and whatever is actually in the picture2. Bernie or Hillary and Expanding Brain layouts are frequent hosts for the swap.